"Women, she said, are too sensible to try to write such broad-sweep theses"

Yes, for someone as clever as she is, she does occasionally come out with stupid stuff like this. And you've got to say its pretty sexist too- can you imagine if a male intellectual had said something similar about a woman?

I was in the Brown bookstore a few weeks ago and the browsing tables were littered with big idea books. Explanations for everything were right there to be had.

It just made me laugh.

The fact is, Hitchens and Gladwell are journalists, not thinkers (Dawkins, I believe, is in a different class -- but I haven't read him).

The gig of the idea-journalist is to popularize big ideas by making them sound even bigger. Gladwell is a smart, entertaining writer, but it's not like he's pumping out The Orgin of Species or The Double Helix.

Gladwell's gift is the ability to choose interesting topics to write about. How hard is that to figure out?

This polemic fits in nicely with an article Althouse posted a few nights ago.

“Their idea is, in broad outline, straightforward. Dr. Crespi and Dr. Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’.

What if our brains are different enough to cause us to focus/think differently?

She wrote huge ideas and no one stops to wonder how her vagina defines those ideas. Her ideas were all encompassing, revolutionary ideas.

Are women writers still seeking approval above all else? I wouldn't think so, considering how in-your-face they can be about feminism... but on second thought about that, (and considering the hysterics over Palin), being the correct sort of feminist obviously gains approval from the "right" people.

If we're going to have Richard Dawkins in the Labels, let's give some credit to Lynn Margulis as a purveyor of big ideas. It's hard to imagine a more broad-sweep thesis than asserting that the modern synthesis is fundamentally flawed.